[oranges]

Shareasales' ftp datafeed is different than the other networks datafeeds. The other datafeeds either make the info available through an html or ftp it directly into your site. What people (at least me) didn't know is that direct server to server ftp is usually not allowed. To get the datafeed to your site so you can treat it like the rest, use this code.

chdir('<directory where you want the datafeed on your site>');
$foo = system('wget --ftp-user=<sas user id> --ftp-password=<sas password> ftp://datafeeds.shareasale.com/<merchant id>/<merchant id>.txt.gz');

Thanks to Snib who told me which command to use (wget)